Daily Archives: 2018-01-09

Philo Middleton wasn’t having a very good day. It began with him waking up strapped to a chair inside a strange, high-tech chamber. His mind was wiped clean, even his own name unfamiliar to him. And yet somehow things went sharply downhill from there.

The Author writes in his Intro (abbreviated)

Some ideas just don’t fit anywhere. Maybe they are too comedic. Maybe they bend the rules of a setting a little too far. Maybe, let’s face it, they aren’t very good. I’m sure plenty of people can just throw these ideas away and move on, but I’ve got a terrible habit of fixating on something until I get it written down.

To solve the “stubborn bad idea” problem, I started a Word document on my computer labeled The Bad Idea Exercise. I would jot down, or sometimes even flesh out, the awful ideas that I couldn’t get past.

I’d decided I’d scrape the best of them together into a patchwork setting and start putting them out once a week, unedited and free, for anyone who wanted to read them. I called the result Between.

The Bad Idea Exercise continued to grow, and eventually I realized I might just have the dots necessary to connect into a complete story. I hope you enjoy this, the literary equivalent of turning spoiled milk into tasty cheese, because it was a riot to write it.

What he has ended up with is a very long (203k word) novel that hangs together surprisingly well. It contains elements of science fiction and fantasy, but it all comes under the ‘imaginative fiction’ genre. So I’m not sure why he thinks this would be difficult to sell. It could be compares to Terry Pratchett or Simon Haynes. There is a lot of comedy in the story, especially between the main characters.

Philo is a human dumped in a strange land. Trixie is a Demoness with attitude and Trill a three headed snake. They eventually get to solve problems and try escaping.

The main problem is the novel’s length. With a good editor it could have been halved in length and would sell well in the ‘Comic Fantasy’ genre.